Virtual Servers

[RSi Dave]

Been looking today at possibly migrating some older servers to Virtual ones on our work network, i was just wondering what software people use to do this sort of thing?

So far managed to briefly check out Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and VMWare Server.

Any others that might be worth checking out?

 

[Andy.]

We have been migrating everything over at our place using VMware.... very successfully!

 

[Pettsi]

We have 5 physical and 15 virtual. Our 15 virtual run on VMWare.

 

[JackoR26]

How do you do the disk config?

Use a partition on a SAN or just a virtual disk file?

 

[David]

VMWARE for the definite win, got all sorts of virtual servers running off ours.

 

[Daz]

My experience has always been pretty poor with VM's of any nature..
Dunno why, but they just never seem to perform?

Physical hardware FTW TBQFH.

I think if I had a proper infrastructure, with SAN etc, it may be different..
So, if you do go down that route, really invest in the infrastructure!

 

[dk]

if people are looking at virtualisation then in production, something like MS virtual server or vmware server are really not the product to look at, theres a reason they are free...........

VMware ESX Vi3.5 is the market leader with about 80% of the market so thats what I would suggest. A host based (free) product will typically gave a 15-20% overhead whereas a bare metal product (esx) has about 2-3% overhead and is more secure.

To get all the fancy features you need a san of some sort.


People can get between 2 and 20 vm's onto a physical box and that is only going to increase as processors increase cores and ram increases etc.

People don't normally look to virtualise IO intensive apps such as SQL or Oracle, only for testing with those products.

THings that work well are DC, print, FS, exchange roles, AV, WSUS etc.

MS is going to try and take some of vmwares market share with windows 2008 but it remains to be seen which product is better, they are going to be architected in slightly different ways.

Citrix now has Xen which is another option, 99 of the fortune 100 companies run vmware in a production environment, i'll leave you to work out which one doesn't.........

 

[KDF]

The problem with VM is if there is a hardware fault in one server it affects all of the virtual servers..

Virtualization is good and has its place but I would have to agree with Daz, if you can afford it go dedicated.

 

[RSi Dave]

Thanks guys, i understand the issue with the server has an issue and the virtual ones have an issue.

The general useage would be web servers i would imagine, possibly antivirus and just internal testing servers. I would imagine the database servers would stay as they are. We are only a small company however it seems to make more sense doing this than replacing 5 servers for fairly low intensive things.

or am i wrong?

 

[McBunny]

The problem with VM is if there is a hardware fault in one server it affects all of the virtual servers..

Virtualization is good and has its place but I would have to agree with Daz, if you can afford it go dedicated.

unless its just been used in a cluster or as a fail over solution with dedicated servers id agree

 

[sh33n]

Don't rule the use of virtualisation out completely.

It can be a very good way to downsize your server amount and cut down on TCO and management overheads.

It can also help to get the best from your hardware.

I'd recommend doing a lot of analysis to be sure, if in doubt get an external contractor to do it for you.

And DK is right, ESX is the way forward if you go this route.

 

[McBunny]

esx maybe teh best at the mo but citrix is wanting to put an end to that very quickly and so are alot of other big companies

 

[RSi Dave]

Just looking at ESX now and it does seem a better option than a host running the software. Just have to do some testing and see what would be best for us.

 

[McBunny]

check out citrix xen too its alot cheaper but it all depends what you want it to do

 

[Daz]

Hyper V in 2008.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/virtualization-consolidation.aspx

 

[RSi Dave]

Overall aim is to consolidate a bunch of old servers, the servers are currently used as apache tomcat webservers running win2000 server and linux red hat for support/test and dev applications. We are also migrating out tower servers to rack servers but i am trying to be cost effective. To me getting 4 virtual web servers to one phyiscal rack seems pretty cost effective compared to buying 4 racks

 

[Pettsi]

How do you do the disk config?

Use a partition on a SAN or just a virtual disk file?

We have 2 SAN's

 

[TELFORDS_LURK]

We use ESX 3 and have had no problems at all. We have a 2 node cluster at the moment soon to be doubled connected to an MSA1000. Both servers are running around 5 - 6 servers each at the moment and we are using about 2/3 of available resources. Having the cluster means we can use VMotion to move the virtual machines to another server on the fly, and there are also High Availability adons for this too.

From what i've seen of Hyper-V at the launch at the ICC in brum last month I dont think VMWare have got much to worry about in the short term.
ESX all the way !!!

 

[dk]

Vmware are about 1-2 years ahead of the competition.

The way vmotion works is a stroke of genius, probably the best computing advance i have seen in the last 5 years.

If a server fails the virtual machines will be started up on an available server in the cluster in about 1-2 mins using HA, virtual machines are VERY fast to start, much faster than running on a on-virtualised server.

Clever things like DRS balancing the vm's over the available hosts so that if one server gets more utilised at the end of the month it will be automatically distributed to make sure it has enough resources.

They also have storage vmotion too, and the power management is very power friendly enabling you to automatically shut down servers over night or at the weekends when they aren't being used much but moving more vm's onto a less hosts and automatically shutting down the servers that aren't needed and then they come back on monday morning when use ramps up.

So many amazing technologies that the competition really are quite far behind!

 

[Mike_182]

Depends what you're looking at virtualising. For us, VMWare Server (We're running 1.0.5) is fine. We run 6 virtual telephony archive databases on one DL140 - they are rarely accessed but for legal reasons we need to keep them indefinately. There's around 6Tb call recordings on DVD-RAM and there were 6 5U servers running permanently to run this.

I migrated them onto a single 1U server with a 3U direct attached storage array (U320) and this has had little effect on performance whilst paying for itself in 2 years purely on electrical and air conditioning costs.

We also run a legacy system that requires Windows 2000, and when published through Citrix can only have one instance on a server. I've set up 3x virtual machines each on 5 Dell 1855 Blades and used Citrix load evaluators to ensure that the servers only get one session. We're using 5 'spare' servers (our farm is massively overspecced) to run 15 servers which saves us 15U. We don't need ESX as we're publishing through Citrix which means we have more space for our heavier used servers.

But as has been said, if you're putting DC/File/Print/WSUS/Client Security etc on, then you want to set up a VMWare cluster with shared storage and run ESX. As DK mentioned it's absolutely fantastic and is so much better than using physical servers 99.99999% of the time.